


don't blame me, love made me crazy

by LadyAlice101



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Kinda Dark, ambiguous/dark sansa, elements of sub jon, idk how else to describe it tho, kidnap plot, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-23
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-18 18:13:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21531166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyAlice101/pseuds/LadyAlice101
Summary: Jon had hoped that he was stronger than this, but – when he stumbles into the Throne Room of the Red Keep, sleep deprived and sick to his stomach with guilt and worry and fear, he catches sight of Sansa gagged and bound by Cersei’s side, her red hair sheared to her jaw and a bruise blooming across her cheek, and he immediately falls to his knees.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 15
Kudos: 221





	don't blame me, love made me crazy

**Author's Note:**

> the gorgeous @abi117 shared [this article](http://www.justjared.com/2019/11/21/game-of-thrones-cast-filmed-alternate-ending-for-season-8/) with me two days ago, and it immediately made me think of the leaked photos in which jon knelt to Cersei and .........

Jon is very sure that, if she’s still alive, Sansa will be furious with him.

There is very little that is more important to Sansa than Northern Independence – as she has made abundantly clear over the past few moons – including her own life.

But to Jon, _nothing_ is more important than Sansa.

As the ash and smoke had cleared after the Battle for Winterfell, as the bodies were collected and moved and burnt in pyres, as Jon had searched everywhere for his beautiful sister-cousin, it had slowly become clear that she wasn’t to be found.

The castle had been thrown into a frenzy when they’d realised that Sansa was neither in Winterfell nor amongst the dead, and it wasn’t for three days that they’d learnt what had become of her.

The scroll Cersei had sent had also held a lock of Sansa’s fiery hair, and as the meeting of the Lords raged around him as they all debated on what to do, Jon had been unable to speak or listen as he’d stared at the etches in the wooden table and imagined all of the terrible things Cersei would be doing to her.

All it took was one foolish Lord to suggest that they leave the Lady Sansa in King’s Landing, because after all they still have their King and no Dragon Queen to worry about – “so why bother sending our exhausted men across the country to retrieve one woman who’s probably dead anyway?” – for Jon to stand from his chair. It had scraped across the floor and sent every single man silent, including that who had _dared_ to suggest they leave Sansa in Cersei’s clutches. Jon didn’t know who he was, still doesn’t, but his face is memorised so that when Jon gets back he’ll have his head.

Jon knows – gods, he _knows_ – that he is playing right into Cersei’s hands, probably even better than she’d imagined. He knows that he’s in no state of mind for this, because he’ll likely pay any price Cersei demands of him if she lets Sansa go free. 

Any political savvy Jon had had within him had died with Daenerys.

He is too exhausted now to do much other than climb atop the only dragon that remained in the world and fly south.

He’d intended to ride a horse, but the thought of Sansa in King’s Landing for longer than the two days it will take him to fly down . . . he would have killed three horses and near on himself, if he’d had to, but he has a dragon now and so he goes as quick as he can.

By the time he arrives in King’s Landing, he’s slept only for a minute or two here and there in the two days it took him to fly, and perhaps even less than that in the days before, when he had no idea where she was and every time he’d closed his eyes to sleep all he could see was the variety of ways she might be being tortured.

Jon had hoped that he was stronger than this, but – when he stumbles into the Throne Room of the Red Keep, sleep deprived and sick to his stomach with guilt and worry and fear, he catches sight of Sansa gagged and bound by Cersei’s side, her red hair sheared to her jaw and a bruise blooming across her cheek, and he immediately falls to his knees.

Cersei doesn’t even need to smile her cruel, vicious smile for Jon to know that he has already lost.

Sansa may hate him for this, for how quickly and easily he has revealed his desperation, but he can’t care. Not when he wants her to leave with her life. Above all else, that’s what matters to him: that she’s alive, and home.

Because despite it all, despite the whispers that have followed him since he came back to life that claim him a god, or the praise that he is the greatest swordsman to ever live, or the stories he knows are shared that always, _always_ glorify his battles and make them seem easier than they were, make it out like _he_ brought victory when really it was sheer luck; despite it all, he is just a man, who is in love with a woman, and who couldn’t bear to see her die.

“Please,” he croaks, eyes downcast in that way that he has learnt so well since becoming acquainted with Daenerys, “ _please,_ let her go. I’ll give you anything.”

He hears Cersei stand, but he daren’t look up at her. Her feet come into his line of vision, her black dress swirling around her shoes, and still he stays prostrated before her.

Pathetic, perhaps, and certainly not the man he was raised to be but - . . . he doesn’t know what else to do, and he’s far past gambling with Sansa’s life. He has known nothing but keeping her safe and protected since he emerged into this cursed second life, and has committed each act he has with only one goal in mind.

_I’ll protect you, I promise._

“Your miserable grovelling has made this much less satisfying than I’d hoped it would, bastard.”

Jon stays quiet.

He doesn’t care, he _doesn’t care,_ all he wants is Sansa in his arms, and then back in Winterfell (for surely Cersei will not let them both leave, and Jon made his peace with dying in the South the moment he stepped foot on Dragonstone and Daenerys had his boat taken away).

“You’re just like your father,” Cersei says, a haughty tone to her voice. “You have a _dragon_ to bargain with, to threaten me with, and yet you’ve still come here with the hope that your desperate words will convince me to set her free?”

Jon wonders how this might have ended, if he’d come to Cersei with the determination of fire and blood rather than the melancholy of his true House, and he knows that he could never have condemned a whole city to burn just because he is in love.

Cersei bends down and grasps his chin in her fingers, and when she brushes her lips over his temple Jon gets a strong whiff of wine on her breath.

“You’re pretty like Rhaegar, though, aren’t you?”

For a moment, fear grips his heart as he realises Cersei has learnt the truth of his parentage. It releases a moment later when he remembers that he doesn’t have to worry about the secret spreading now Daenerys is gone.

Cersei pulls away from him, her green eyes piercing his soul, and as she turns her back to him and walks back to her Throne, she calls over her shoulder, “You’re in love with her, then?”

“More than you know.”

The frown that mars Cersei’s face after his confession is unexpected, but he stays focussed on it. He doesn’t dare turn to Sansa and see her reaction to the truth.

“I know a thing or two about Targaryen men in love with Stark women,” Cersei says, then lets a contemplative silence fall over the hall.

Jon doesn’t move from where he’s knelt, even though his entire body aches and begs to be released into sleep. _You don’t need her!_ He wants to scream. _Not now you have me. I’m the_ Targaryen, _a threat to your reign._

“I’d planned to take you, and kill your dearest Sansa of course,” Cersei says, after they’ve sat in silence for so long Jon becomes unsure whether his knees will ever unbend, “but I think that if I did, you might just throw yourself from a window, and I have much more important uses for you than that.”

Jon dares to cast his eyes over to Sansa at that. She’s staring back at him, an unreadable if fairly passive expression on her face. She’s still wearing the dress he saw her in last: the black one, with the leather armour laid over the torso, a look so fierce that the first time he saw her in it hr almost fell to his knees to grasp the hem of it and beg for her forgiveness (or to fuck him, maybe, he still isn’t sure which request would have spilt from his lips).

Aside from the bruise, and the way her hair has been hacked at, she looks relatively unharmed. It’s likely untrue, but Jon will gain nothing by trying to pull apart the aloof expression she’s adopted. He would know; he’s tried many times before.

“I’ll let her go,” Cersei agrees finally. “Back North, where she belongs. As part of _my_ Kingdom, but I suspect you already knew that. In return, you’re to stay here, bastard.”

Both of these demands Jon had expected. It makes it no easier to witness Sansa’s frown, and to feel his heart break over the thought that the last time he’ll ever see her she is displeased with him.

But they are things he can live with if it means her freedom and her life.

The gag is pulled from Sansa’s mouth, and then she’s thrust onto her feet. The harsh shove of the guard makes her stumble, and it’s enough to make Jon attempt to rise to his feet, but then hands are clamped down on his shoulders and he can’t move.

“Your Grace,” Sansa says, coy and clipped as she curtsey’s. “Thank you for your kindness. If you would permit me just one more thing, I would like to say goodbye to Jon.”

Cersei quirks an amused brow, then waves her hand in permittance and takes the final gulp from her goblet.

Sansa’s steps are sure and true as she comes towards him, and she wastes no time in kneeling down for him. In a move that mimics Cersei, she grasps his chin; she is much more tender than Cersei was, much more loving. Her fingers caress his jaw, and then she leans in and kisses him.

Jon feels like his brain and heart stop, and while the kiss lasts only a second at most, he still chases after her lips, desperately wanting more.

Cersei’s amused laugh cuts through the air, but Jon’s eyes are still closed as he wishes that the moment never had to end; that he could live forever in that second in which his lips were pressed against Sansa’s, where they belonged.

“Oh, if only Ned Stark could see you now!” Cersei says with delight, clapping her hands together once. “How I would _relish_ watching his face turn down in that infuriating frown of his.”

Sansa nuzzles her nose against his, a wolf-like gesture of care, but her fingers dip into his jaw just a little bit tighter, giving way to the possessiveness underneath.

“Don’t worry,” she whispers, “I won’t let her marry you.”

Jon hadn’t been worried about that, but as soon as Sansa says it he realises that this must be what Cersei meant when she said _more important uses for you._

Sansa stays hovered over him, and he wishes she would kiss him again, but she doesn’t. She just stays with her face pressed against his, and Jon thinks that if this is the last time he ever see’s her, then at least they had this. It is so comforting, in fact, that Jon is sure he falls asleep against her cheek, because one moment he is basking in the peace of her, and the next a terrible, wet cough permeates the air.

He opens his eyes and goes to pull away from Sansa, but she cups his face with her hands and hushes him, brushing the curls by his temple in a such a soothing way that he relaxes into her again.

Another cough, louder this time, and then a gasp. Jon has seen enough death in his life to know the sound of it intimately.

Footsteps echo, desperate and hurried, and then Cersei’s rasping voice hisses, “What have you done?”

Jon doesn’t let Sansa distract him this time. He pulls away from her to watch as Cersei falls to her knees, grasping desperately at her throat, her face an ugly shade of red and purple, with blood dripping from her mouth.

Sansa doesn’t move away from Jon as guards rush over to their queen, and Jon can’t tear his eyes away from Cersei.

“An ugly death,” Sansa admits to him, her voice a whisper in his ear. “But now she gets to be with her son. And she can die like him, too.”

“You did this?” Jon asks.

“In her wine goblet.”

Sansa doesn’t elaborate further, but he doesn’t need any more detail. He likely should feel disgusted that Sansa could bestow what is obviously a slow and painful death upon another person, but - . . . his first life changed him, and his death changed him even more. He feels nothing for Cersei, despite the way she’s died, like he felt nothing for Ramsey, or Daenerys.

They are just deaths, necessary deaths, because Jon and Sansa have been put in a position in which they’re forced to choose: us or them.

It is not his fault that they have come out victorious on all counts.

“Go on, then,” Sansa encourages him, kissing the arc of his cheekbone, “get your sword. Kill the guards.”

Jon rises to his feet immediately, and gets his sword from where it lays, abandoned by a guard that had rushed over to his dying queen. Jon makes his way through the handful of them easily and quickly, and soon enough they are left alone in the Throne Room that stinks of death and blood.

Jon turns back to Sansa, blood splattered across his clothes. She smiles at him, a small thing, but his heart swells nonetheless.

Sansa moves over to where Cersei lies, empty eyes staring at the sky. She bends down to Cersei’s prone body and picks the golden circlet from the dead woman’s head.

When she places it atop her own head, the gold of it swimming in the beauty of her now-short hair, Jon’s breath is blown from his lungs.

The bruise that is flowered on her cheek doesn’t dim her beauty in the slightest, and the blue of her eyes sparkle as her gaze falls back on him.

Sansa doesn’t remove the Queen’s crown as she makes her way over to him, and the diamond encrusted points of it dig into the skin of his cheek when she pulls him close.

“Oh, Jon,” Sansa sighs, and he can’t quite make out her tone, can’t figure out the intricacies of the way his name sounds on her tongue, the way each letter dances as if she’s tasting them in her mouth. She backs him up, so that his knee’s hit the Iron Throne and he falls into it. “Thank you for coming. My silly, brave Northman.”

Sansa sinks down on top of him, her fingers spearing through the curls at the nape of his neck, and she brushes her lips over his. Even such a gentle, brief kiss is better than he could have imagined, and the noise that escapes his throat sounds like the whimper of a dog.

It pleases Sansa, however, as she smiles against him and then captures his mouth in a much harder kiss. She fills his hands and his mouth and his mind with her body, and then he fills her, too, right there on the Iron Throne, the dead bodies of their enemies still littering the floor.

She bites his ear when she peaks, and he pants between her breasts when he spills, and afterwards, she straightens herself from his lap and lets her dress fall back down around her ankles like she didn’t just fuck him atop the Iron Throne, while he stays sitting there, a confused yet satiated mess.

With Cersei’s crown still perched delicately on her head, Jon knows that Sansa, despite having been kidnapped, has outmanoeuvred them all; including him.

But Jon doesn’t mind. This is a battle he is happy to lose.


End file.
